On the west side of Manhattan, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, there is a nearly seventy-foot-tall concrete building containing five thousand tons of road salt. The walls of the Spring Street Salt Shed slope inward and outward in enormous pale planes; the whole thing is meant to resemble a grain of salt. Across the street stands a much larger garage that accommodates more than 150 sanitation vehicles, its long facades covered in glass and aluminum louvers. The two buildings were designed together, an attempt to make a sprawling sanitation facility fit into a residential neighborhood where residents had initially fought its construction. Writing about the complex in 2016, Architectural Record called the shed “as compelling as many pieces of public art in Manhattan.”

The Salt Shed is a Dattner Architects project, designed with WXY Architecture + Urban Design. So are the 34th Street–Hudson Yards subway station, the Bronx Library Center, parts of Hudson River Park, Riverbank State Park, and thousands of units of housing around New York. Richard Dattner founded the firm in 1964, and public architecture and infrastructure have been central to its work ever since.

Now the more than one hundred workers at Dattner are taking an unusual step in their industry: organizing with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). The proposed wall-to-wall bargaining unit includes designers, architects, and operations staff across the firm, excluding management and certain other positions. Organizers say they have support from a supermajority of workers.

On October 21, Dattner workers will gather at city hall for a listening session with Deputy Mayor Julie Su to discuss the union effort. The meeting comes as workers are pressing the firm’s partners to agree to a process for recognizing their union without a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election.

“The City has long worked alongside union employers, and we’ve seen the value that worker voice brings to public projects,” said Cassio Mendoza, a spokesperson for Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “We support every worker’s free and fair choice on this question, and the decision belongs to them.”

The campaign has been quietly underway for years, extending across Dattner’s three studios and among employees at different points in their careers. Building a supermajority at a firm of this size took time, particularly with workers coming to the campaign for different reasons. “Some might be personal or specific to the firm, while for others, it might be about broader concerns with the industry and previous experiences that they had,” a Dattner designer said.

Three Dattner employees spoke to Jacobin for this story. We would ordinarily identify workers discussing their organizing efforts, but there have been allegations of retaliation against union supporters in the architecture industry in recent years. At the firm Snøhetta, eight employees lost their jobs shortly after a 2023 union election. The NLRB later accused the firm of firing them for their union activity. The case has yet to be resolved. We are withholding the Dattner employees’ names so they can speak freely about the campaign.

Dattner is, by the accounts of the workers I spoke with, a relatively good place to work. A licensed architect at Dattner described it as a leader in working conditions within the industry. That makes its union campaign an opportunity to set a precedent. “If we don’t lead this effort, if a firm like ours just can’t or won’t lead this effort, who’s going to?” the architect asked.

Dattner calls itself a mission-driven firm. Riverbank State Park puts a park atop a wastewater treatment plant; Via Verde, designed with Grimshaw, is a mixed-income housing development in the South Bronx; the 34th Street–Hudson Yards station was the first new subway station to open in the city in more than twenty-five years. Much of the firm’s work is commissioned by public agencies.

“We’re trying to create in our work a more democratic city, more democratic spaces for people to live in,” the architect said. “If we want to make more democratic spaces, that starts in the office. And having a more democratic process in the office is only going to allow us to do our jobs better, fulfill our mission better.”

The architect is easy to imagine somewhere above the city, a kind of deity with the vision to change the landscape of a metropolis and the power to make everyone else go along: scores of people to build it, and the rest of us to live in it. A line on an architectural drawing can eventually become an instruction for many others to build something. But getting from that line to the building requires engineers, contractors, construction workers, clients, and public agencies, along with plenty of work inside the architecture firm itself.

The work can mean navigating building codes and zoning rules, responding to clients, and producing and revising digital models and drawings. “There is drudge work,” an associate at Dattner said. “It’s not all drawing pictures and picking colors.”

Becoming a licensed architect can take a long time, too. According to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, the average person who earned a license in 2025 took 12.3 years to get there, including their education.

For all that education and training, architecture is not an especially lucrative profession for many of its practitioners. The profession nevertheless retains a powerful image of the architect as a singular creative genius, a Frank Lloyd Wright whose talent might eventually bring wealth and acclaim. For those who imagine they might someday join his ranks, long hours and modest pay can seem like dues worth paying.

“There’s this culture of suffering for the work, of pouring yourself into it because it is this creative discipline,” the Dattner architect said. “I’ve been in situations before where we felt like we needed to explore another idea, we needed to explore another scheme, and it’s just not acceptable to say, ‘We don’t have time for that.’”

Long hours are familiar to architects well before they enter the profession. Architecture students routinely spend nights in the studio, and the hours don’t necessarily improve once they’re employed. Firms compete for commissions, often on price, and employees can end up working nights and weekends to get projects finished.

“I know many of my classmates who have already left the profession before they got licensed because it wasn’t sustainable for them,” the designer said.

The cost of living in New York has made the profession’s pay harder to accept. “My rent costs more money, and I’m more exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life,” the Dattner associate said.

“We were all sold this bill of goods: go to college, get educated, become a white-collar professional, and you’re going to have a good life,” said the Dattner architect:

We love what we do. I do have a good life, and there are certainly many working-class people who are being squeezed much more. But between the affordability crisis, AI, and discussions of how things need to change in our industry that have been going on for the past decade, it has created a moment where folks like us see an opportunity. People who came before us fought for labor rights, fought for the ability to bargain, and now it’s our time to take up the charge.

Architects have not traditionally thought of themselves as the sort of workers who form unions. But neither did many other white-collar professionals — including graduate students, journalists, and tech workers — who have been organizing in recent years.

C. G. Beck, an architect and writer involved in organizing in the industry, welcomed the Dattner campaign. “Dattner’s unionization campaign is a step forward for all workers in our industry,” Beck said.

Peggy Deamer, an architect and a founder of the Architecture Lobby, a grassroots organization advocating for better working conditions and unionization in the profession, has spent years urging architects to think of themselves as workers, with the same concerns about pay, hours, and working conditions as anyone else.

Through its Architectural Workers United campaign, the IAM has been involved in a small wave of organizing efforts at New York City architecture firms, where private sector unionism had barely existed for generations. In 2021, workers at SHoP Architects filed for an NLRB election with the IAM. They withdrew the petition shortly before the scheduled vote after what the union described as a “powerful anti-union campaign.”

In 2022, workers at Bernheimer Architecture took another route: the firm voluntarily recognized its union, the first union at a private sector American architecture firm in decades. The workers ratified a first contract in 2024, winning a thirty-six-hour workweek, compensatory time off for additional hours, and overtime pay after forty-five hours. Workers at Snøhetta voted thirty-five to twenty-nine against unionization in 2023. At Sage and Coombe Architects, workers won voluntary recognition that year and ratified a first contract this spring. Of those campaigns, the two that have reached a first contract were recognized voluntarily.

At Dattner, workers have asked management to agree to a process for recognizing the union without an NLRB election. Under the proposed agreement, Dattner would remain neutral while a third party checked whether a majority of employees had signed union cards.

On September 23, workers sent Dattner’s partners a letter requesting a card-check neutrality agreement. Six days later, the partners circulated a response to employees, reviewed by Jacobin, calling the IAM’s approach “secretive” and arguing that union representation should be decided through an election, “just as the way we pick a mayor or senator.”

Architecture firms have been struggling with a prolonged downturn. According to the American Institute of Architects, firms have reported declining billings for most of the past three and a half years. In August, firms in the Northeast reported their steepest decline since 2020.

The partners, meanwhile, warned that unionization could cost Dattner clients, claiming that the small architecture firms where the IAM had won recognition “have not thrived in the wake of unionization and the employees do not seem to have benefitted.” They also claimed that once employees unionized, it would become illegal for management to make individualized accommodations for employees, although federal labor law does not categorically prohibit such arrangements. They further disputed the idea that collective bargaining would give workers a say in which projects the firm pursued or how it conducted business. Dattner’s management did not respond to a request for comment.

The organizing committee sent a second letter on October 5. “We are not requesting voluntary recognition, nor an election agreement,” the workers wrote. “Considering the current federal administration, we believe that it would be best for everyone to find a process outside of the NLRB.” They also emphasized that they were not seeking a predetermined union contract. “Our contract is our own,” they wrote. They asked the partners to meet with their union representative and respond by Friday, October 9; the firm did not respond by the deadline.

“Meet us at the table,” the Dattner associate said when asked what she would like to say to Dattner’s management. “We’re ready and excited to talk about the ways that we see this being beneficial, not just for the firm, but for something larger than ourselves.”

If the union is recognized, the IAM says, Dattner would become the largest unionized architecture firm in the United States. Workers argued that unionization could help the firm retain employees and appeal to clients that share its commitments. They also hoped to have more influence over how the firm operates, including greater transparency around compensation.

“We can’t see the books,” the Dattner associate said. “The office purports to have positive values, including equity, and they tell us that we have pay equity. But we can’t confirm that without really having a seat at the table.”

“This is not a movement against anything,” she said. “It is a movement for something. There’s a lot of positive energy among the group about how working as architects doing important work for the city and beyond can be something that also includes a great quality of life and a great working experience.”